Puritan Blister #42

.38s and Heartbreaks

I’d vowed that 2009 would, at least initially, be a year of pure pop escapism, especially after how pointedly/limitingly I used music as a sort of tourniquet/palliative for 2008's psychic wounds. But just two weeks into the new year, a family friend killed himself while arguing with his fiancee. Those of us by whom he is survived are, understandably, agonizing over the subjective prescriptions we could have offered him: religiosity, Successories, credit lines, lasagna, advice, etc. But as ridiculous as it may sound, even by Puritan Blister standards, I am tortured that, as I sat beside him during Christmas dinner, or on New Year's Eve, I didn't recruit him into the cult of Kanye West's latest album, because it might have saved his life, or at least gotten him through the season.

I'm on board with my fellow columnist Tom Ewing's statement from last week: 808s and Heartbreaks has mutated into "my primary winter soundtrack," too. In his review, Pfork editor Scott Plagenhoef's acknowledgement that the album is "a bit of a grower," was utmostly understated; Heartbreaks is like kudzu, or the pubic space-fungus that eventually engulfs Stephen King's yokel character in the first Creepshow movie. It's just such a pop achievement. Blending bootybass percussion with sounds from dated epics such as Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, the album floors me with its mix of ice and syrup, of club and sulk, of strings and whomp, of kneejerk blame and circumspect diagnosis, of gospel requiems and Austin Powers references. I mean, shamwow! The consistently catchy and interesting hooks that seem willed into being, despite how we're supposed to be let down by how he's not "rapping"! The badass sequencing, like when the extended outro of "Bad News" burps into the Lil Wayne monster! The vocal fuzz on "Street Lights"! The lonesome-hotel-suite-TV static blasts of "Coldest Winter"! Etc.

But for my departed friend K---- (no, his name was not also Kanye), the album might, if given a chance, have served him like a self-help book. While Heartbreaks is mottled with sentiments that could be considered to be just as adolescent and as codependent as the worst pop cliches to which codependent adolescents are subject, it also contains heaping doses of rebuild-itude, that almost-delusional daily-affirmational quality that'd possibly assist with alley-ooping a wayward recently-single entity back into a version of functional selfhood. Grandstanding notwithstanding, Kanye's stages of grief collide with his pronouncements of damage control, making Heartbreaks more dignified than a female acquaintances's recent condemnation of it as a "boy version of Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward." It's a breakup album as much as it's a put-me-back-together album. It self-admits much as it fingerpoints. It turns the other cheek as much as it fantasizes about vengeance. It's funereal, but it struts.

K---- shot himself in the head, in front of his intended, who'd been re-contacting an ex and who was threatening to leave him. His online profiles abound with devotional snippets seemingly torn from the very template of the kind of "only you" songcraft that does such a disservice to certain ill-equipped young folks: "I cannot breathe without you," "you are my universe," and so forth. His life was like a goddamn Xiu Xiu song: sold as a toddler into a type of fake-identity/incestuous same-sex slavery by his junkie mother, he'd only been on his own for a few months. He wouldn't take his shirt off at the beach because of how he'd been burned with cigarettes and shot with arrows as a child. The novice grownup K----, though, made his living via weaponry and the furniture of conventional predation, selling knives, guns, ammo cases, and deer stands. What he craved most was legitimate parental love.

Tellingly, the tracks on his MySpace profile aren't full of rage, nor are they "Goodbye Cruel World"-ish, or even contemporary; they're by Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, and Conway Twitty, all selections from the teensy post-divorce vinyl collection of my 60-year-old mother, whom he sort of adopted. (As a Pitchfork asshole, I must admit that I'm going batty to not be able to remember the performer of, or to have successfully Googled, that vocodery German version of Lionel Richie's "Hello", which would have worked as a perfect robo-segue into Kanye's Auto-tunings.) K

's girlfriend's profile's current track is Mariah Carey's "Bye Bye", which-- I'm sorry-- sounds flimsy next to Kanye and Conway; again, this is not my business, the equivalent of sprinkling some Lucky Charms cereal in with K

‘s ashes.

Ugh. I'm to left to flinch at everything for a while, to insulate myself from the very pleasures I'd hoped to pursue. Now I don't want to listen to Blood on the Wall, or 120 Days' "So This Is Suicide". With K----‘s remains buried, I don't want to hear Kevin Barnes sing that he and his soulmate are "always touching by underground wires." I can't watch the Joy Division documentary. I can't abide the term "kids" the way that indie abuses it; I'm, like, all conservative, too wired on control-worries about actual children. So no scene kids, Black Kids, Cool Kids, Sexy Kids, No Kids, or Cold War Kids. I don't want to be exposed to any Romeo-&-Juliet-esque examples of the doomed-lovers archetype, or for that matter, any examples of its less committal update, the mildly-inconvenienced-lovers of You've Got Mail, or Step Up 2 The Streets. I can't chuckle in my office regarding a poster that a student at my dayjob made about "suicide in the media," which cautionarily features, alongside Sylvia Plath and the Heaven's Gate cult, the famous non-suicide John Lennon. And no hip-hop videos for a while: K

drove an Escalade.

How to let K----‘s death be about K----, and avoid letting it serve as an excuse to lube up the gorge of self-trivia? I mean, pop's escape has nothing to offer if one can't weather the phrase "I just died in your arms tonight"! I feel suddenly mean about an unsympathetic post-mortem review of an Elliott Smith disc that I typed for (cheap irony alert) No Depression. I'm freaked about an uncle who seemed to sit, during the holidays, too deeply and tightly on the couch, like my grandfather did, before his own suicide-by-gunshot. I keep trying to imagine the mind so traumatized that it'd fulfill the last four lines of a Phillip Larkin poem that I first encountered through the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, during a live rendition of his song, "Then the Letting Go", named after an equally suicidal line from Emily Dickinson:

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

K

died while I was munching popcorn at an enjoyably terrible 3D remake of the slasher film from which one of the greatest modern bands took its name. K---- will never have the janky thrill of seeing another bad movie. He's already missed a light snow. He's going to miss too many concerts, and so much Obama kitsch. And for all I know, he never got to hear "Love Lockdown", perhaps the greatest Nina Simone song not written by Nina Simone.